Services or capabilities described in Amazon Web Services documentation might vary by Region. To see the differences applicable to the China Regions, see Getting Started with Amazon Web Services in China (PDF).

Operations

In this section we will cover some of the native Amazon services that help you with day-to-day operations of your IBM Db2 database for SAP applications.

Monitoring

Amazon provides multiple native services to monitor and manage your infrastructure and applications on Amazon. Services like Amazon CloudWatch and Amazon CloudTrail can be leveraged to monitor your underlying infrastructure and APIs, respectively.

CloudWatch provides ready-to-use key performance indicators (KPIs) that you can use to monitor CPU utilization and disk utilization.

You can also create custom metrics for monitoring IBM Db2.

With Amazon CloudTrail, you can log, continuously monitor, and retain account activity related to actions across your Amazon infrastructure. Amazon CloudTrail is enabled on all Amazon accounts, and records your account activity upon account creation. You can view and download the last 90 days of your account activity for create, modify, and delete operations of supported services without the need to manually set up CloudTrail.

Backup and Recovery

You need to regularly back up your operating system and database to recover them in case of failure. Amazon provides various services and tools that you can use to back up your IBM Db2 database of SAP applications.

Amazon Backup

Amazon Backup is a fully managed backup service centralizes and automates the backup of data across Amazon services. Using Amazon Backup, you can centrally configure backup policies and monitor backup activity for Amazon resources, such as EBS volumes, Amazon EC2 instances, and Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS). Amazon Backup automates and consolidates backup tasks previously performed service-by-service, removing the need to create custom scripts and manual processes. Amazon Backup provides a fully managed, policy-based backup solution, simplifying your backup management and enabling you to meet your business and regulatory backup compliance requirements.

AMI

You can use the Amazon Management Console or the Amazon CLI to create a new Amazon Machine Image (Amazon AMI) of your existing SAP system. This can be used to recover your existing SAP system or create a clone.

The Amazon CLI create image command creates a new AMI based on an existing Amazon EC2 instance. The new AMI contains a complete copy of the operating system and its configuration, software configurations, and optionally all EBS volumes that are attached to the instance.

A simple command to create an AMI with reboot (if running) of your EC2 instance (with instance ID i-0b09a25c58929de26 as example) including all attached EBS volumes:

       aws ec2 create-image --instance-id i-0b09a25c58929de26 --name "My server"

A simple command to create AMI without reboot (if running[underline]) of your EC2 instance (with instance ID i-0b09a25c58929de26 as example) including all attached EBS volumes:

aws ec2 create-image --instance-id i-0b09a25c58929de26 --name "My server" --no-reboot

Amazon EBS Snapshots

You can back up your Amazon EBS volumes to Amazon S3 by taking point-in-time snapshots. Snapshots are incremental backups, which means that only the blocks on the device that have changed after your most recent snapshot are saved.

Snapshots are suited to backup SAP file systems like /usr/sap/* , /sapmnt/*. We do not recommend using snapshots to back up your volumes containing data and log files. If you decide to take snapshots for your database volume snapshot, keep in mind that for consistency you should use Microsoft’s Volume Shadow Copy Service and use the run command to back up or shut down your database before Snapshots is triggered.

A simple command to create a snapshot of volume (with volume id vol-1234567890abcdef0 as example):

        aws ec2 create-snapshot --volume-id vol-1234567890abcdef0 --description "This is my volume snapshot."

Database Backups

One of following methods can be used for IBM Db2 database backup:

Storage

The storage services we use across this guide are:

Amazon EBS

Amazon EBS provides persistent storage for SAP applications and databases. EBS volume size can be increased or their type can be changed (for example, gp2 to io1) without downtime requirements. For more information, see Modifying Amazon EBS volume.

Once you have extended the volume, you need to extend the drive with your Linux volume manager software.

Amazon S3

Amazon S3 does not need you to explicitly provision storage at all – you simply pay for what you use.

Operating System Maintenance

Operating system maintenance across large estates of EC2 instances can be managed by:

Here are some key operating system maintenance tasks that can help with:

Patching

Follow SAP recommended patching processes to update your landscape on Amazon. For operating system patching, with Amazon Systems Manager Patch Manager you can roll out OS patches as per your corporate policies. There are multiple key features such as:

Amazon Systems Manager Patch Manager integrates with IAM, Amazon CloudTrail, and Amazon CloudWatch Events to provide a secure patching experience that includes event notifications and the ability to audit usage. For details about the process, see How Patch Manager Operations Work. If Amazon Systems Manager Patch Manager does not fulfil your requirements, there are third-party products available as well. Some of these are available via the Amazon Marketplace.

Maintenance Window

Amazon Systems Manager Maintenance Windows enables you to define a schedule for when to perform potentially disruptive actions on your instances, such as patching an operating system, updating drivers, or installing software or patches.

Automation Using Documents

Amazon Systems Manager Automation simplifies common maintenance and deployment tasks of Amazon EC2 instances and other Amazon resources. Automation enables you to do the following:

Business Continuity

Amazon recommends periodically scheduling business continuity process validations by executing disaster recovery tests. This planned activity helps to flush out any potential unknowns, and helps the organization deal with any real disaster in a streamlined manner. Depending on your disaster recovery architecture it may include:

Support

SAP requires customers to have a minimum Amazon Business Support plan with Amazon. This ensures that any critical issues raised with SAP are also handled by Amazon on priority. Amazon business support provides a less than one-hour response time for production-down scenarios. You can also choose to have an Amazon enterprise support plan, which provides a less than 15-minute response time for business-critical systems, along with other benefits. See Amazon Enterprise Support.

For any SAP application issues, Amazon suggests raising an incident with SAP via the SAP support portal. After the first level of investigation, SAP can redirect the incident to Amazon support if they find an infrastructure related issue which needs to be managed by Amazon. However, if you choose to raise support issues for SAP applications with Amazon support, we cannot redirect the tickets to SAP. For any infrastructure related issues, you can raise the issue directly with Amazon support.

Cost Optimization

Resources (CPU, memory, additional application servers, system copies for different tests/validations and more) required the SAP landscape change over time. Amazon recommends monitoring system utilization, and the need for existing systems, on a regular basis to take actions that will reduce cost. In cases of databases like IBM Db2 as we cannot scale out only opportunity to right size database server is by scaling up/down or shutting it down if not required. A few suggestions to consider: